Sunday, March 25, 2012

The Influence of images on memory

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca and I (among others) think that images seen in childhood may be responsible fro some UFO experiences later in life, brought into prominence by stress, neurological malfunctions, medicines, drugs (recreational and otherwise), alcohol, and other factors.

UFO investigators and researchers have generally neglected to ask UFO witnesses to events (alleged abductions among them) what they’ve eaten, drunk, or used just before their experience.

And investigators have not asked what magazines, movies, books, or, more recently, what television shows were part of their childhood entertainment.

Betty Hill, born in 1919, and her husband Barney could have been influenced by such imagery as these from the 1930s and 40s, found in Science Fiction magazines during their early lives:

Travis Walton, born in 1953 would have been influenced by images prominent in the late 1950s and early 60s; the imagery embedded in his memory as delineated by Torkel Klingberg, Hans Forssberg, and Helena Westerberg in their work, Increased Brain Activity in Frontal and Parietal Cortex Underlies the Development of Visuospatial Working Memory Capacity during Childhood:

"The amount of information one can keep in working memory (WM) increases throughout childhood and early adulthood (Gathercole, 1999; Luciana & Nelson, 1998; Hale, Bronik, & Fry, 1997)."

And images such as those might have affected someone as “manly” as Walton….

…or those who posit reptilian aliens in our midst…

…or those who just see something in the sky…

My point is that UFO research has been wanting and incomplete, no where near scientific and without the protocols and methodologies needed before the epithet “research” should even be mentioned.

That’s why I continue to excoriate UFO personages such as Kevin Randle, Jerry Clark, J. Allen Hynek, and Stanton Friedman. Their forays into UFO sightings and events were and are “vacations” not explorations.